Monique McDade, assistant professor in the School of Writing, Literature, and Film, explores women writers of the American West and their impact on modern literature and society
Monique McDade
By Taylor Pedersen, CLA Student Writer - February 17, 2025
“I think connection is radical in our moment. Storytelling is going to be our lifeline.”
This kind of statement might sound lofty in another voice, though coming from Monique McDade, OSU’s new assistant professor of teaching in early American literature, it lands as both an observation and a call to arms. For McDade, stories are where human connection lives, and she’s determined to remind her students, and the world, of that fact.
McDade grew up in Sacramento, California, in a household where the family’s first computer became her portal to a life focused on words. “When my parents got a second computer, they put the old one in my room because I wouldn’t stop writing stories,” she laughed. “After that, I don’t think I ever came out of my room.”
That private, passionate writing habit led her to become the first in her family to attend college, study creative writing, and eventually earn a Ph.D. in literature from the University of Nevada, Reno. But her path wasn’t linear. “I thought I was solely a writer,” she said. “Then a mentor made me TA a class, and when I saw that moment in students…that click when a text suddenly means something, I fell in love with teaching.”
Today, McDade’s classroom is less about transmitting knowledge than about building a community of readers that dissolves the distance between text and life. Her students don’t just study 18th- and 19th-century women’s writing; they bring those voices into the world through partnerships with public libraries, literacy organizations, and local archives.
“I think a lot about what happens when literature leaves the classroom,” she said. “The humanities aren’t dying, they’re being rediscovered in new forms. When students engage with literacy programs or banned book organizations, they see how reading is not just academic. It’s power.”
Her interest in community engagement grew during her postdoctoral fellowship at Kalamazoo College, in Kalamazoo, Michigan, where she connected students with local literacy programs. “I want students to understand that what we do in the classroom doesn’t end when the class does,” she said. “The goal is to deploy what we learn out in the world.”
That same ethic runs through her scholarship on women writers of the American West, a project that began, unexpectedly, during the 2016 presidential election. “I remember the night after the election. I was up all night, and by morning I knew I had to scrap my dissertation and start over,” she recalled. “I realized we weren’t listening to the women. These were the same stories about progress, power, and erasure that women had been telling for centuries. I wanted to make people listen.”
The result became her first book, a study of women’s writing and the mythologies of the American West. She examined how the language of Manifest Destiny— “frontier,” “progress,” “expansion”—still circulates in modern political rhetoric. “History has always been violent,” she said. “But these narratives keep getting repurposed, and the only way to interrupt them is to bring in the voices that were silenced the first time around.”
McDade’s research and teaching share that same revolutionary thread: literature as a living, breathing conversation, not a relic. “Suddenly that 19th-century text feels alive. It’s not an artifact, it’s a connection.”
That word: connection—comes up constantly in conversation with McDade. For her, it’s both the foundation and the goal of her pedagogy. She sees her students not as receptacles for knowledge, but as collaborators in exploration. “I don’t want them to impress me,” she said. “I want them to explore. To think critically. To change their minds. Legacy, to me, is exploration; the courage to keep learning, even when you leave the classroom.”
In a time when the humanities are often dismissed as impractical, McDade’s work insists on their urgency. She partners with communities not to defend the humanities, but to prove their vitality. “We protect the humanities to protect everything else,” she said simply. “Reading helps us understand other people’s perspectives. It helps us have hard conversations. It helps us stay human.”
“If you brought 19th-century women writers into this moment,” she said, “I think they’d be proud. They would see women claiming their voices, their desires, their space in the literary world. They would see connection surviving.”
In the end, McDade’s work isn’t just about the past or even about books; it’s about people. “The stories we tell now will become the record of this moment,” she said. “Someday, someone will read them and learn how we survived… how we found each other again through words.”
At OSU, she’s teaching her students to start writing that story now.